Thursday, June 29, 2017

"Flashes Of What We Wish Would Occur Every Time But It Doesn't"

My 25 year-old car’s radio just died.It’s a Nakamichi.Not the car, the radio.Who ever heard of a Nakamichi automobile?Although some Japanese
companies make everything, from
nuclear weaponry to waffle irons.(Note:The preceding is an exaggeration, though not inaccurate
in its intention.)

My Nakamichi car
radio – I just like saying “Nakamichi”
– comes equipped with a CD player, whose apparatus, including 12 slots for
CD’s, is situated in the trunk.

One day recently, the illuminated panel that normally
reflects the radio station or CD I am listening to instead displays a dispiriting “F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F“
designation.The machinery goes mute,
and that’s all she wrote.

My Nakamichi is
kaput.No replacement available; Nakamichi went bankrupt.My car is bereft of an accompanying
soundtrack.Now, I drive and I hum.

Over the decades, reflecting my musical proclivities and
their late mid-twentieth- century stagnancy, there were three CD’s (all formerly
cassettes, when they made them and I drove a different car) that were always included
amongst my panoply of audial entertainment – Carole King’s Tapestry, the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens’s Tea for the Tillerman and James Taylor’s
Sweet Baby James.

Other selections came and went, but those three remained
forever.And by “forever” I mean they
made the transition from cassette to CD – and from Saab to Lexus – and were
still on the playlist when my Nakamichi
system gave up the ghost.

Driving silently, during a momentary interlude in my humming,
my mind goes – and not for the first time – to an interesting creativity-related
conundrum.

You may not agree with this, but it’s how it appears to
me.And I’m a creative professional so
think twice about saying I’m wrong.(You
know I don’t mean that, don’t you?)

There’s a song on Sweet
Baby James called “Fire and Rain.”Over
his career, James Taylor has written – ballpark – hundreds of songs (many of
which sound the same.)None of them, I
submit, reaches the dazzling perfection of “Fire and Rain.”

Though many of James Taylor’s songs are highly enjoyable, “Fire
and Rain” feels objectively, if you can use “objectively” in an evaluative
context…

Better.

Why exactly, I frequently wonder, would that be?

A man’s a superior songwriter. Yet one
of his efforts towers majestically over the others.

Why?

Is it the song’s emotional content?Is it its biographical underpinning?Is it the overall execution?Does “Fire and Rain” resonate
synchronistically with “The times”?Or
with my inner environment, or, may I suggest, all of ours? (Except for the
people who think I am egregiously off-base.)

What, do you imagine, makes “Fire and Rain” demonstrably the
best song James Taylor ever composed?

I am thoroughly unknowledgeable about paintings or opera or
classical music.Is this phenomenon
detectable in other artistic endeavors as well – the practitioner’s output is
universally recognized but one particular work veritably radiates with
spectacularness?

How does that happen?It’s the same guy.Using the same
skills, the same notes, the same colors.Then, out of their oeuvre,
emerges a prodigious home run.

I will now drop down to talking about myself.Because that’s who I woke up as today, and
that’s who I have been all my life.And,
on a considerably lower level, I too have experienced this curious phenomenon
and humbly wish to weigh in.

During my relatively long and relatively successful career,
I wrote or co-wrote somewhere around a hundred half-hour sitcom episodes.But, over that period of active
participation, only a couple of them really caught fire.

And I cannot explain to you why.

If I am consistently capable, how come I am “exquisitely capable”… almost never?Although still sometimes, which means I have the capacity to do so.

What did I eat for breakfast when I blasted one right out of
the park?I wish I knew.I’d have eaten it every morning.(Only to discover that it wasn’t the food.)

A random pondering, driving along in my musicless motor car.(If you discount the humming, though I do not
see why you should.)

2 comments:

First and least: you should probably get your Nakamichi replaced (ooh, that sounds painful). Although, much like 78 rpm record players, they aren't being made anymore there are plenty listed second hand on Ebay. Doesn't your local garage owe you? Ask them to find out what part isn't working, order it, and have them install it.

I was going to be a contrarian but there's little to argue with here. Those three albums are "classics" in the sense that like "Sgt. Pepper" or "In the Wee Small Hours" people will be discussing and enjoying them 50 years from now. My… er… contrarian sense was to say "how do you know that was their best - have you heard all of their material"? But I have heard most of Carole King's albums as well as Cat Stevens' (and Yousef Islam's for that matter) and I would be forced to agree with you - these albums are far and away the best. But this is very much in the eye (ear?) of the beholder. My very favorite Earl Pomerantz script, one which I don't go a week without thinking of and laughing, was an otherwise obscure episode of "The Bob Newhart Show" featuring Richard Libertini. There were plenty of laugh lines - "beef bourguignon" - and the plot was in that magic area between surreal and mundane.

Good luck with the car. And, if Dr. M. needs an idea for a present, have her buy you the Richard Taylor album "Mud Slide Slim". He made it right after "Sweet Baby James" and shared the musicians who were also working on "Tapestry" at the time.